The five swords have been out of my 360, unpowered cube for a couple of years now. Generally I don't draft with more than 4 people, and sometimes just 2. Having a sword of your opponents' colors is pretty oppressive. I'm not sure if I should leave them out or try to jam in more answers to artifacts. I already run a fair amount of disenchant effects, and I think many more would water down card selection. While drafting with fewer people means we see fewer cards, having 5/360 cards in the cube is still a decent chance to have a couple show up in the draft. Fewer cards drafted also means fewer answers to the swords. Anyone have any opinions?
I soon found that these lesser equipments (the latter ones), weren't carrying their weight so I decided to add Jitte and Sword of Light and Shadow. While they became high picks, they weren't too oppressive in play. They gave aggro decks the much needed umph, while control and combo decks had no use. I then added the rest of the sword cycle and so far nothing oppressive has come of it.
I have a 620 card unpowered cube and still draft at low numbers (3-4). Having the swords is great for decks that want them. Decks that don't want them have ways to deal with them, or just don't care. The sword cycle is the strongest and most interesting set of equipments. I think it's fine to include even at 360 cards.
I like the Swords not only because they are fun and splashy but also I see Cube as an extension of my collection. However, there's been one person in my playgroup who has been pretty vocal against Swords. He draws parallels to how even Randy Buehler took the Swords out of the Legacy cube as he saw them as too degenerate. Other than him, there's really no one that sees a problem with them. I will take them out before a draft if someone has a problem with them, but otherwise I'm looking to complete my set.
But I feel the best stories come from playing against or even with Swords. My favorite match to watch was one player was beating down with a Sword of Light and Shadow equipped onto a Looter il-Kor. He was dead on the next turn and his opponent was at a healthy 29 life with 4 blockers on the field. His board had a whole bunch of derpy 1/1 tokens from Marsh Flitter and Myr Battlesphere. He draws Mirror Entity and immediately plays it. He activates Mirror Entity's ability to make all his creatures 4/4s. He swings in with the team of 11 attackers into 4 blockers and taps the summoning sick Mirror Entity to the Battlesphere's ability for exactly lethal. Everyone went crazy, one of the best moments from my cube.
Jitte, on the other hand, I have found to be pretty necessary against mono-red. Mono-red aggro tends to be one of the more powerful but one of the easiest archetypes to draft in my cube at least. Jitte is one of the few cards that hoses mono-red and I justify Jitte's place for that reason.
Jitte, on the other hand, I have found to be pretty necessary against mono-red. Mono-red aggro tends to be one of the more powerful but one of the easiest archetypes to draft in my cube at least. Jitte is one of the few cards that hoses mono-red and I justify Jitte's place for that reason.
This strikes me as taking a sledgehammer to a grape. There are plenty of ways you can hose mono-red without playing a format warping card like Jitte.
Swords are expensive (5 to cast and equip one and you still have to hit a player with it to get any real benefit). Power level wise, I don't think they are a problem for most unpowered cubes. It's the double protection that can just randomly screw people over though. And that's the main reason I got rid of them. If you run a high amount of artifact removal though, I think they are fine in unpowered if you are cool with the random protection hosing. And in powered where everything is busted (especially fast cubes), these are almost underpowered.
Jitte though is just broken. It's the best equipment card ever printed (and it's not even close). It's a removal check that is horribly oppressive if you don't have said removal, and it can be played in pretty much any deck (because let's be honest here, how many creatureless decks would you instead choose to build versus picking Jitte if you opened it in a pack?).
Either you have removal when your opponent plays Jitte, or you lose. It's nigh unbeatable if you can't get rid of it. With that said, in a powered environment every deck is doing broken things so it's really not out of place there. But slow things down a little and dial back the power level a bit and this card just becomes retarded.
Considering the competition is already steep I don't think swords would be overpowered in a 360 unpowered list. They're great aggro tools just as Balance and Treachery are great control tools. You'll always have something that is much more powerful than the average cube card until you cut power and then 20 or so cards on top of that. There are plenty of great artifact removal effects to allow swords in at 360 that should be mainboarded anyways and I do believe that a classic, powerful cube (even unpowered) should have at least enough artifacts to justify running mainboard artifact destruction.
I wouldn't fault a designer for not running them, check with your playgroup to see what they think since they're the ones who draft with you.
Swords are strong. They are amongs the stongest cards in an unpowered cube, but even in a powered cube they rock.
People seem to overestimate the difference between powered and unpowered. It matters for some cards (Tinker, Trinket Mage, Gorilla Shaman,Snapcaster Mage,...) but Tinker and Snapcaster Mage still rule in a unpowered cube. Those few cards don't change the balance of your whole cube.
Swords are always strong and can be game winning quite often, which is why they can be first pick material. One way they can be truly oppressive if you happen to be unlucky and have exactly their colours in your deck. But that is just bad luck. Mainly I think is that a lot of people don't run enough 'destroy artifacts' effects. Everybody agrees decks need creature removal, but even in cube, a environment filled with broken artifacts and enchantments, a a lot of people don't pick enough Disenchant-effects.
It might just be the downside of your way of drafting. The variance is higher in two or four player drafts. It is easier to find yourself without the right answers, but it also is easier to find yourself having too many swords for too little ceatures, not enough reanimition targets for your reanimate deck, having an artifact deck but somehow only having only one or two mana rock.
Powered or unpowered is just a small factor in this and clearly not the most important. I think the conclusion is that games can be won by 'bombs' and this happens more when your decks are weaker. As a two or four player draft gives less focused decks then full table drafts, sometimes your deck will not be able to defend against certain cards. Be it swords, big fatties or enchantments.
Five mana to play and equip is a lot so I would consider cubing them. Having an answer at that point in the game - generally turn 4 or 5 - should be possible, and if it's instant speed, then you can create a big tempo swing and possible card advantage which balances the big impact the Swords have. Dedicated artifact removal is something important even in unpowered settings. Jitte on the other hand I would not cube in an unpowered setting as described by the other posts. 2+2 is rather different than 3+2 in practice and the effect can't be nullified by blocking the creature like the Swords can.
I don't think they're too good for unpowered cubes. There are a lot of cards that are found in unpowered lists that are far more egregious in powerlevel than the Swords are.
Body and Mind is the only one I might say is too powerful. Jitte is absolutely bonkers but otherwise forces you to play a somewhat fair aggressive deck unless you sneak it into a deck with a few weenies like blue control or elves ramp.
They can be stopped with counterspells, creature removal, or artifact removal. I find that to be one of the learning lessons from playing cube and designing cubes with the swords and jitte in it: EITHER play a degenerate deck OR play a "fair" deck with artifact removal.
This isn't only because of the swords, it's because of cards like Shackles, Mimic Vat, mana rocks, Batterskull, Wurmcoil, Sundering Titan... etc
For me, the reason to cut Swords is that I don't like 'protection from color' as a design for a limited format. Protection is randomly either irrelevant or close to unbeatable.
For me, the reason to cut Swords is that I don't like 'protection from color' as a design for a limited format. Protection is randomly either irrelevant or close to unbeatable.
This is the one area I think a powered environment has a big advantage design wise over unpowered. Artifact removal cards are never dead and because of that you can run more narrow stuff main deck like Manic Vandal or Disenchant because you will always have a target (whether it's a mox or something like a sword, Jitte, clamp, etc.).
In unpowered, you have to make a difficult design choice around this. Do you push a high powered enchantment/artifact theme so you can make the above cards main deckable? Do you instead make side boarding a more important aspect of your meta where you may need to bring these cards in for certain match ups? Or do you remove the must-be-answered-or-you-lose enchantment/artifacts altogether and remove (or at least greatly reduce) the need for as much enchantment/artifact hate?
All three are viable, but each comes with it's own pros and cons.
See, in my opinion, if you run all the swords most decks drafted will have at least one target for a disenchant effect. Even if there are some decks that do not get a sword, there are other crazy bomb artifacts that you would want to remove. Stuff like Vedalken Shackles, Lodestone Golem, signets, deal broker, metamorph, ankh, black vise, mimic vat, etc are all worth main boarding the card for. I would feel bad about my deck if I didn't have a main board way to kill an artifact and that keeps swords under control.
Those five moxen and that Sol Ring don't make that much difference in total Disenchant targets. Maybe if you also ban Jitte and all fast mana, that you end with too few targets, but I still doubt it. There are almost always Disenchant targets, also in an unpowered cube. Just as you side out creature removal, you can side out Disenchant if you feel like they are not worth it.
I always find it strange that some people complain about strong artifacts and enchantments, but the same people keep on passing all the Disenchant, sex monkies and Manic Vandals. You cannot have your cake and eat it. You can ignore defence, but will logically have consequences.
Those five moxen and that Sol Ring don't make that much difference in total Disenchant targets.
I don't agree with that. Those cards (moxen and sol ring) are auto includes in virtually every deck imaginable. They are almost always P1P1, and if they don't go immediately, the next guy will take and play them. The odds of you facing a deck with at least one of these cards is very good. The only thing you are more likely to see are basic lands.
When my cube was semi-powered, it was heavily dominated by the moxen. When I took them out and de-powered a bit, it became dominated by equipment (Jitte, swords, clamp). Now that I removed all that, you see very few cases where pulling your disenchant is the difference between winning and losing games (creature removal OTOH is a completely different story).
Again, there is no right or wrong with how you build your meta - different strokes for different folks. You just have to balance removal with the threats you run and enchantments/artifacts are trickier than creatures to get right because much of the removal is narrow and limited to specific colors. I don't personally think it's one of the better designed features of Magic honestly and while you can certainly work around it, it's pretty easy to jack it up too balance wise if you aren't mindful of the warping effect some of the more broken pieces have on the game (especially with limited answers).
The powered artifacts make up an incredibly small percentage of disenchant targets. Even if they were gone, I'd still maindeck artifact hate in every deck I play.
The Swords are indeed very powerful, but I'm not sure I agree that they are too powerful for unpowered cubes. If I wanted to remove "power" from my cube, I'd be looking at Jitte for being too oppressive long before I started looking at the Sword cycle. They can be back breaking, that's for sure. Sometimes they have just the right protection or just the right ability against your deck.
But let's talk about powerful oppressive artifacts for a minute. To the folks that have removed the Sword cycle because they are too good and regularly win games on their own that might not have been won without them, what other artifacts are you cutting for these reasons? How about Tangle Wire? I've won tons of games based on 1-drop, 2-drop, Tangle Wire. Winter Orb falls into that same category as well. What about Batterskull? I'd much rather see a Sword across from me than this thing.
I can completely understand (and sometimes even relate to) not wanting to run powerful fast mana in your artifact section. It can be incredibly unfun to lose to a deck that has access to four or more mana on turn two. We can tell you to draft and maindeck Disenchant effects, but losing to a turn one Sol Ring means that you had an incredibly small window to find one of those answers before your opponent ran away with the game. In the case of the Swords and other powerful artifacts, though, the window to find your answer(s) is much larger. If you don't draw your answer, that's just bad luck. Sometimes your opponent plays a five drop on turn five and you can't draw one of your six answers to safe your life. It happens. With that said, though, it drives me nuts to see people cutting Disenchant with the "I can side this in" mentality when it's their only answer to these types of cards. I don't first pick Disenchant, but I do take it highly and I do maindeck it a good percentage of the time. There are so many really good artifacts and enchantments in the cube that it just seems insane to me to not run these types of cards in your deck.
tl;dr Swords are not too good. Draft Disenchant. Play Disenchant. If you draft and play enough answers and still don't draw one, that's bad luck. It's not the Sword's fault that you didn't draw well.
Swords are only overpowered if you allow them to be that way in your cube environment. Speeding up the cube can turn equipping into a liability where you have to spend too much time or mana doing it and possibly get blown out tempowise by a well timed spell.
But let's talk about powerful oppressive artifacts for a minute. To the folks that have removed the Sword cycle because they are too good and regularly win games on their own that might not have been won without them, what other artifacts are you cutting for these reasons? How about Tangle Wire? I've won tons of games based on 1-drop, 2-drop, Tangle Wire. Winter Orb falls into that same category as well. What about Batterskull? I'd much rather see a Sword across from me than this thing.
I agree with that. Cutting the swords and leaving everything else doesn't remove the need to run a critical mass of disenchant effects.
There are at least a dozen artifacts more oppressive than the swords (other than the random double protection scenario when it happens to be your deck colors). I'd take clamp, jitte, batterskull, shackles, all 5 moxen and ring obviously, orb, mana crypt, mana vault, black lotus and maybe Myr Battlesphere (assuming it's later in the draft and I have tinker and/or other pieces to abuse it - I'm not sure that's the right thing to do though). I might also take smokestack because I love pox decks. And maybe coalition relic because that thing is busted (and the only unfair mana rock I still run). Those last three choices are probably not objectively better than a sword though.
If the swords didn't have protection (maybe intimidate against two colors or something instead), I'd run them. I didn't want to take them out, but the double protection thing is just randomly annoying and feel bad . I left one in for nostalgia for a long time and that worked out OK because it could only show up in one deck. This thread is making me miss the swords honestly, so maybe I'll bring one of them back for a short run.
I have very few uber powerful artifacts at this point (just wire, shackles and battle sphere from the above list and the last two probably shouldn't be in my cube honestly).
Tangle Wire though is a really cool card with a lot of play to it. It's certainly very strong, but I don't think it requires a disenchant effect or you lose. But that likely has a lot to do with all the creature removal I run. 1 drop, 2 drop, wire is a beautiful start for an aggressive deck certainly, but it only auto wins if the other guy went durdle, durdle, uh oh. Even if the aggro guy went first, the other player on turn two can counter the wire (if they are playing blue) or they could have dropped a blocker which would have slowed things down, or they could kill the 2 drop in response with instant removal (or could have with sorcery speed as well). All those plays would greatly reduce how much damage wire did in that game (and none of them required a disenchant).
The only times I've seen wire really break the game is with welder and/or other recurring shenanigans (resetting fade counters, etc). And in those cases, straight disenchant isn't always an answer.
The swords suck. 5 mana is way too much for what they do and if they get bulleted you just lose from the tempo loss.
Except when the abilities line up just right and the opponent doesn't have a bullet and they come down and win the game.
Neither of those situations are fun or interesting and the middle ground where they do something interesting is too infrequent to justify their inclusion.
The swords are bad design, they have no place in any cube.
Protection from color is not at all in line with what I envision for a Cube environment, so from that point of view the Swords are indeed bad design.
TheElGrande may not have put it the most eloquent way, but the point he makes is worth considering. What if the swords did not provide protection, would they be good? The triggered abilities could then easily be stopped by blocking. Sorcery speed removal or instant speed removal drawn a turn too late would still be helpful. Of course a single hit from a Sword would still provide a lot of value, and it is certainly possible to engineer a turn where you can play and equip a Sword. 5 mana in that scenario is definitely not on the cheap side.
With the protections mixed in, the Swords provide the value necessary for the 5 mana investment, but because of the nature of protection from color in a limited environment, the price for this is a higher variance. Some people like high variance, some despise it.
Really I thougth ElGrande was trolling, but if this was serious then he just hasn't lost enough to swords I think. The protection is very nice, but the main thing is the advantage you get from the damage triggers. One time is bad enough, but if you get repeatable hits through, your opponent is screwed.
Without the protection we wouldn't run all swords probably, but a sword like Fire and Ice is just so good that the protection is the icing on the cake. Very nice icing, but it would still be very cubable without.
Are swords a tempo loss? Sure they are slowish equipment, but this is just how they work. You cannot have cheap equipment and have it be incredibly powerful. That is like complaining that fatties cost a lot of mana. That is what makes them a fatty.
Swords are good, but I often pick Bonesplitter over it for example. Swords have to compete with other three drops in your deck. In aggro decks this can be quite hard, while every aggro deck can use a Bonesplitter. The fact that there are five also makes that people feel this is a bigger problem then it is. This make it seem that you have more 'problematic' games, but you should divide this by five.
I like the evasion and protection granted by the Swords. The double-protection makes it far less of a random gamble, because having 1 of the 2 protections being relevant is pretty common. It makes creature threats more relevant, increases the value of evasion, encourages players to play answers to artifact threats and colorless cards, and allows you to extend your board presence without overcommitting. Sometimes there's a feel-bad moment when your Orzhov deck runs into a Sword of Light and Shadow, but that's okay. There are TONS of powerful cards in the cube that have favorable matchups against certain decks; protection is no different. Draft/play answers to Swords in your deck, and play answers to creatures with protection. I don't think it's flawed/bad design at all. I think they do exactly what they were intended to do, and the protections add valuable aspects to the cards. They're powerful cards, and they add a suite of very scary threats that can appear in a multitude of different decks, and they always seem to do different and unique things as the abilities and the protections lend themselves to being situationally dependent effects, which makes for excitement and variance. I think they're well designed, powerful, and perfectly suited for this environment.
Never understood all the hate for protection, its a fine mechanic. It is still possible to beat a sword that has both protections relevant against your deck.
Average draft size was 3-4, and I forbid Umezawa's Jitte as well as any sword from the cycle.
Instead I used Bonesplitter, Loxodon Warhammer, Sword of Vengeance, and a whole slew of other bad equipments including Trusty Machete, Leonin Scimitar, Sylvok Lifestaff, etc.
I soon found that these lesser equipments (the latter ones), weren't carrying their weight so I decided to add Jitte and Sword of Light and Shadow. While they became high picks, they weren't too oppressive in play. They gave aggro decks the much needed umph, while control and combo decks had no use. I then added the rest of the sword cycle and so far nothing oppressive has come of it.
I have a 620 card unpowered cube and still draft at low numbers (3-4). Having the swords is great for decks that want them. Decks that don't want them have ways to deal with them, or just don't care. The sword cycle is the strongest and most interesting set of equipments. I think it's fine to include even at 360 cards.
But I feel the best stories come from playing against or even with Swords. My favorite match to watch was one player was beating down with a Sword of Light and Shadow equipped onto a Looter il-Kor. He was dead on the next turn and his opponent was at a healthy 29 life with 4 blockers on the field. His board had a whole bunch of derpy 1/1 tokens from Marsh Flitter and Myr Battlesphere. He draws Mirror Entity and immediately plays it. He activates Mirror Entity's ability to make all his creatures 4/4s. He swings in with the team of 11 attackers into 4 blockers and taps the summoning sick Mirror Entity to the Battlesphere's ability for exactly lethal. Everyone went crazy, one of the best moments from my cube.
Jitte, on the other hand, I have found to be pretty necessary against mono-red. Mono-red aggro tends to be one of the more powerful but one of the easiest archetypes to draft in my cube at least. Jitte is one of the few cards that hoses mono-red and I justify Jitte's place for that reason.
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This strikes me as taking a sledgehammer to a grape. There are plenty of ways you can hose mono-red without playing a format warping card like Jitte.
Swords are expensive (5 to cast and equip one and you still have to hit a player with it to get any real benefit). Power level wise, I don't think they are a problem for most unpowered cubes. It's the double protection that can just randomly screw people over though. And that's the main reason I got rid of them. If you run a high amount of artifact removal though, I think they are fine in unpowered if you are cool with the random protection hosing. And in powered where everything is busted (especially fast cubes), these are almost underpowered.
Jitte though is just broken. It's the best equipment card ever printed (and it's not even close). It's a removal check that is horribly oppressive if you don't have said removal, and it can be played in pretty much any deck (because let's be honest here, how many creatureless decks would you instead choose to build versus picking Jitte if you opened it in a pack?).
Either you have removal when your opponent plays Jitte, or you lose. It's nigh unbeatable if you can't get rid of it. With that said, in a powered environment every deck is doing broken things so it's really not out of place there. But slow things down a little and dial back the power level a bit and this card just becomes retarded.
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I wouldn't fault a designer for not running them, check with your playgroup to see what they think since they're the ones who draft with you.
People seem to overestimate the difference between powered and unpowered. It matters for some cards (Tinker, Trinket Mage, Gorilla Shaman,Snapcaster Mage,...) but Tinker and Snapcaster Mage still rule in a unpowered cube. Those few cards don't change the balance of your whole cube.
Swords are always strong and can be game winning quite often, which is why they can be first pick material. One way they can be truly oppressive if you happen to be unlucky and have exactly their colours in your deck. But that is just bad luck. Mainly I think is that a lot of people don't run enough 'destroy artifacts' effects. Everybody agrees decks need creature removal, but even in cube, a environment filled with broken artifacts and enchantments, a a lot of people don't pick enough Disenchant-effects.
It might just be the downside of your way of drafting. The variance is higher in two or four player drafts. It is easier to find yourself without the right answers, but it also is easier to find yourself having too many swords for too little ceatures, not enough reanimition targets for your reanimate deck, having an artifact deck but somehow only having only one or two mana rock.
Powered or unpowered is just a small factor in this and clearly not the most important. I think the conclusion is that games can be won by 'bombs' and this happens more when your decks are weaker. As a two or four player draft gives less focused decks then full table drafts, sometimes your deck will not be able to defend against certain cards. Be it swords, big fatties or enchantments.
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They can be stopped with counterspells, creature removal, or artifact removal. I find that to be one of the learning lessons from playing cube and designing cubes with the swords and jitte in it: EITHER play a degenerate deck OR play a "fair" deck with artifact removal.
This isn't only because of the swords, it's because of cards like Shackles, Mimic Vat, mana rocks, Batterskull, Wurmcoil, Sundering Titan... etc
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This is the one area I think a powered environment has a big advantage design wise over unpowered. Artifact removal cards are never dead and because of that you can run more narrow stuff main deck like Manic Vandal or Disenchant because you will always have a target (whether it's a mox or something like a sword, Jitte, clamp, etc.).
In unpowered, you have to make a difficult design choice around this. Do you push a high powered enchantment/artifact theme so you can make the above cards main deckable? Do you instead make side boarding a more important aspect of your meta where you may need to bring these cards in for certain match ups? Or do you remove the must-be-answered-or-you-lose enchantment/artifacts altogether and remove (or at least greatly reduce) the need for as much enchantment/artifact hate?
All three are viable, but each comes with it's own pros and cons.
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I always find it strange that some people complain about strong artifacts and enchantments, but the same people keep on passing all the Disenchant, sex monkies and Manic Vandals. You cannot have your cake and eat it. You can ignore defence, but will logically have consequences.
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I don't agree with that. Those cards (moxen and sol ring) are auto includes in virtually every deck imaginable. They are almost always P1P1, and if they don't go immediately, the next guy will take and play them. The odds of you facing a deck with at least one of these cards is very good. The only thing you are more likely to see are basic lands.
When my cube was semi-powered, it was heavily dominated by the moxen. When I took them out and de-powered a bit, it became dominated by equipment (Jitte, swords, clamp). Now that I removed all that, you see very few cases where pulling your disenchant is the difference between winning and losing games (creature removal OTOH is a completely different story).
Again, there is no right or wrong with how you build your meta - different strokes for different folks. You just have to balance removal with the threats you run and enchantments/artifacts are trickier than creatures to get right because much of the removal is narrow and limited to specific colors. I don't personally think it's one of the better designed features of Magic honestly and while you can certainly work around it, it's pretty easy to jack it up too balance wise if you aren't mindful of the warping effect some of the more broken pieces have on the game (especially with limited answers).
http://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/modular-cube-5-colors.800/
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But let's talk about powerful oppressive artifacts for a minute. To the folks that have removed the Sword cycle because they are too good and regularly win games on their own that might not have been won without them, what other artifacts are you cutting for these reasons? How about Tangle Wire? I've won tons of games based on 1-drop, 2-drop, Tangle Wire. Winter Orb falls into that same category as well. What about Batterskull? I'd much rather see a Sword across from me than this thing.
I can completely understand (and sometimes even relate to) not wanting to run powerful fast mana in your artifact section. It can be incredibly unfun to lose to a deck that has access to four or more mana on turn two. We can tell you to draft and maindeck Disenchant effects, but losing to a turn one Sol Ring means that you had an incredibly small window to find one of those answers before your opponent ran away with the game. In the case of the Swords and other powerful artifacts, though, the window to find your answer(s) is much larger. If you don't draw your answer, that's just bad luck. Sometimes your opponent plays a five drop on turn five and you can't draw one of your six answers to safe your life. It happens. With that said, though, it drives me nuts to see people cutting Disenchant with the "I can side this in" mentality when it's their only answer to these types of cards. I don't first pick Disenchant, but I do take it highly and I do maindeck it a good percentage of the time. There are so many really good artifacts and enchantments in the cube that it just seems insane to me to not run these types of cards in your deck.
tl;dr Swords are not too good. Draft Disenchant. Play Disenchant. If you draft and play enough answers and still don't draw one, that's bad luck. It's not the Sword's fault that you didn't draw well.
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I agree with that. Cutting the swords and leaving everything else doesn't remove the need to run a critical mass of disenchant effects.
There are at least a dozen artifacts more oppressive than the swords (other than the random double protection scenario when it happens to be your deck colors). I'd take clamp, jitte, batterskull, shackles, all 5 moxen and ring obviously, orb, mana crypt, mana vault, black lotus and maybe Myr Battlesphere (assuming it's later in the draft and I have tinker and/or other pieces to abuse it - I'm not sure that's the right thing to do though). I might also take smokestack because I love pox decks. And maybe coalition relic because that thing is busted (and the only unfair mana rock I still run). Those last three choices are probably not objectively better than a sword though.
If the swords didn't have protection (maybe intimidate against two colors or something instead), I'd run them. I didn't want to take them out, but the double protection thing is just randomly annoying and feel bad . I left one in for nostalgia for a long time and that worked out OK because it could only show up in one deck. This thread is making me miss the swords honestly, so maybe I'll bring one of them back for a short run.
I have very few uber powerful artifacts at this point (just wire, shackles and battle sphere from the above list and the last two probably shouldn't be in my cube honestly).
Tangle Wire though is a really cool card with a lot of play to it. It's certainly very strong, but I don't think it requires a disenchant effect or you lose. But that likely has a lot to do with all the creature removal I run. 1 drop, 2 drop, wire is a beautiful start for an aggressive deck certainly, but it only auto wins if the other guy went durdle, durdle, uh oh. Even if the aggro guy went first, the other player on turn two can counter the wire (if they are playing blue) or they could have dropped a blocker which would have slowed things down, or they could kill the 2 drop in response with instant removal (or could have with sorcery speed as well). All those plays would greatly reduce how much damage wire did in that game (and none of them required a disenchant).
The only times I've seen wire really break the game is with welder and/or other recurring shenanigans (resetting fade counters, etc). And in those cases, straight disenchant isn't always an answer.
http://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/modular-cube-5-colors.800/
Retro combo cube thread
http://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/retro-combo-cube.1454/
Except when the abilities line up just right and the opponent doesn't have a bullet and they come down and win the game.
Neither of those situations are fun or interesting and the middle ground where they do something interesting is too infrequent to justify their inclusion.
The swords are bad design, they have no place in any cube.
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TheElGrande may not have put it the most eloquent way, but the point he makes is worth considering. What if the swords did not provide protection, would they be good? The triggered abilities could then easily be stopped by blocking. Sorcery speed removal or instant speed removal drawn a turn too late would still be helpful. Of course a single hit from a Sword would still provide a lot of value, and it is certainly possible to engineer a turn where you can play and equip a Sword. 5 mana in that scenario is definitely not on the cheap side.
With the protections mixed in, the Swords provide the value necessary for the 5 mana investment, but because of the nature of protection from color in a limited environment, the price for this is a higher variance. Some people like high variance, some despise it.
"What am I looking at? Ashes, dead man."
Without the protection we wouldn't run all swords probably, but a sword like Fire and Ice is just so good that the protection is the icing on the cake. Very nice icing, but it would still be very cubable without.
Are swords a tempo loss? Sure they are slowish equipment, but this is just how they work. You cannot have cheap equipment and have it be incredibly powerful. That is like complaining that fatties cost a lot of mana. That is what makes them a fatty.
Swords are good, but I often pick Bonesplitter over it for example. Swords have to compete with other three drops in your deck. In aggro decks this can be quite hard, while every aggro deck can use a Bonesplitter. The fact that there are five also makes that people feel this is a bigger problem then it is. This make it seem that you have more 'problematic' games, but you should divide this by five.
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